thought of little else in that time. So she scowled at him now, bristling a bit where she sat.
“Of course.” He waited when she paused. She made herself breathe in, then out. Count to ten. “I mean... I think I do.”
“Ah.”
Lily didn’t understand how he could steal all the air from the room when she was looking straight at him and could see with her own eyes that he hadn’t moved at all. She frowned harder in his direction, though it didn’t seem to help. If anything, she found it harder to breathe.
“I don’t see the point in talking about this,” she said then. She jerked her gaze away from his, sure he could read entirely too much on her face, and scowled down at the cuff of her sweater as if it contained the answers to these mysteries. She picked at it with her other hand. “Obviously, what I remember or don’t remember is irrelevant. You have the blood work.”
“I do.”
“And that’s why we’re here.” Lily swallowed, then lifted her head again to meet his gaze. This time, she held it. “But what about you?”
“Me?” He looked faintly amused, or as amused as anyone could look with so much thunder in his gaze. “I know exactly who I am.”
“But you were my stepbrother,” Lily said, and tilted her head slightly to one side, hoping she looked curious rather than challenging. “How did any of this happen?”
* * *
She looked fragile and something like otherworldly tonight, Rafael thought, with her thick strawberry blond hair piled high on her head. It only called attention to the delicate elegance of her fine neck, something he realized he hadn’t paid enough attention to five years ago. Here, now, he couldn’t think of anything else. She was swallowed up in that oversize sweater, which he imagined was the point of it. The bigger and baggier the sweater, the less of her he could see.
He doubted she realized that without the distraction of that lithe, intoxicating body of hers that still drove him mad, he had nothing to do but parse every single expression that crossed her face and every last telling look in her lovely eyes.
Rafael didn’t believe for one moment that she couldn’t remember him.
And if she didn’t remember him as she claimed, then she couldn’t remember what had actually happened between them, and he could paint it any way he liked. If she could remember him, well, it was up to her to interrupt and set the record straight, wasn’t it?
After all, this was the woman who had failed to tell him he was a father, that he had a son, for five years—and had certainly not come clean about it on her own. If he hadn’t seen her on that street in Virginia, would she ever have told him about Arlo? He doubted it. He would never have known.
He almost wished she really did have amnesia. For her sake.
Rafael smiled at her then and felt rather more like a wolf than was wise.
“It’s really a very sweet story,” he said. He was sure he saw her stiffen. “You were an awkward sort of teenager when our parents got together, ungainly and shy. You hardly spoke.”
“What?” She coughed when he looked at her, and she managed to look so guileless that he almost doubted that he’d heard that sharpness in her voice then. Almost. “I’m sorry. Did you say ungainly?”
“Many teenage girls have those rough patches,” he said, as if he was trying to be comforting. “But I think being around Luca and me helped you a bit. Smoothed out the edges.”
“Because you were both such excellent brothers to me?” she asked, and wrinkled her nose in that way he’d always liked a little too much. He still did. “That pushes us straight into icky territory, doesn’t it?”
Rafael laughed. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. We more or less ignored you.” He waved a languid hand in the air. “Our father is always marrying various women, the more broken the better, and sometimes they come with children we’re expected to treat as family for a while. We all know it’s temporary. A form of charity, really.” He smiled at her, and there was a bit more color on those remarkable cheeks of hers than there had been before. Though that could also have been the cheerful fire that crackled away beside them. “No, I mean that Luca and I dated a wide selection of very elegant, fashionable, socially adept women. You idolized them, of course. It must have been a master class for a girl like you, from such different circumstances.”
She returned her attention to the sleeve of her sweater and fiddled with her cuff. “Were our circumstances so different?”
“I’m really talking more about a certain polish that some girls have. They’re born with it, I think.” He eyed the growing flush on her cheeks, certain it was her temper and not the fire this time, and kept going. “I hope my honesty doesn’t upset you. If it helps, I think European women are better at achieving this polish than American women. Perhaps it’s cultural.”
“How lucky that I had all of the many women you dated to help me overcome my Americanness,” she said evenly. He hoped she was remembering the women he’d dated back then, all of them about as polished as mud, and that her even tone was painful for her. But she only flicked a look at him, her blue gaze unreadable. “Is that what happened? These paragons of womanhood made me one of them and you found you had to date me, too?”
He actually grinned at that and saw the reaction in her clear blue eyes before she dropped them again. But the heat he’d seen there licked over him like wildfire, and his voice was huskier than it had been when he continued.
“You wrote me daily poems, confessing your girlish feelings to me. It was adorable.”
“Poems,” she echoed flatly. “I find that...amazing. Truly. Since I haven’t written a word in as long as I can remember.”
“We haven’t established how long that is, have we?”
“And how long did I attempt to woo you with teenage poetry?” she asked, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You must have found the whole thing embarrassing.”
“Very,” he agreed. “You were so bad at it, you see.”
“Were it not for the existence of Arlo, I’d think this story was heading in a very different direction,” she said dryly.
“On your eighteenth birthday,” he said, as if recalling a favorite old story instead of making it up on the spot, “you stood before me in a white dress, like a wedding gown, and asked me if I would grant you one wish.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “Like a fairy tale. Did you say I was eighteen or eight?”
“Eighteen.” His voice was reproving, and it was hard to keep himself from laughing. “You were quite sheltered, Lily.”
“But not by you, because then the fact that we actually did get together would surely be gross.” She smiled faintly at him. “I’m guessing.”
“You were sheltered by the strict convent school you attended,” he lied happily. She’d been nowhere near a convent in all her life, to his recollection. “You entertained some notion of becoming a nun.”
He could almost hear the crackle
